Chelsea FC Transfer Rumours: Chelsea 'Prepared' To Bid £40M, Daniel Sturridge For Fernando Torres

Just a speculative tweet with information garnered from the Times, but they've been on this story the whole way through, and I thought it was pretty interesting. Apparently, Chelsea, rebuffed at the first attempt in their bid to pry Fernando Torres away from Liverpool, are fully prepared to step the offer up a notch. If they're preparing a £40M plus Daniel Sturridge bid, as Liverpool writer Jim Boardman has suggested, they're getting very serious about meeting Liverpool's price. The tweet in question is after the jump:

Yikes. That's really a lot of money plus one of the more promising young attackers to come through the ranks in a while. If Liverpool agree to that bid and Torres comes to Chelsea without taking a pay cut of any sort, that's £60M plus Danny Sturridge for three and a half years of Torres. Valuing Sturridge at £5M (conservative, I think he's worth significantly more), that totals £18.6M per season for Torres. If that's a price Chelsea are willing to pay, they want him very very badly indeed.

Is Torres willing to come? All signs are pointing towards 'yes'. Again, this is speculative, but I think it's worth repeating, if only because it cheers me up:

Chelsea really do sound like they're willing to make a strong offer here, and Torres is at least interested in joining the club. I'm really not sure if the offer repeated is a bid I'd have made, although I'm not as high on Sturridge as many, but it's certainly a very bold statement for Chelsea to make. If this goes through and we also land David Luiz from Benfica, it'll have been our biggest transfer window since the early days of Mourinho's reign, and, I believe, would also break the British transfer record. Not convinced I want to give Liverpool that much money, but you have to pay to get quality back, and Torres is certainly that.

Look for a post later today about how he might fit into the team's tactical scheme.